Hawthorne spends three years as surveyor of the Salem Custom-House, a brick federal post above a wharf that no longer works. Warehouses rot. A schooner pitches out firewood. For a few hours each morning a flag hangs with the stripes turned the wrong way, the sign of a civil job, not a regiment. Over the door an eagle looks ready to scratch the people who come looking for shelter under her wing. He took the commission because Salem had a hold on him he could not shake, the kind of hold a family gets when it has been planted in one soil for two centuries.
The first of his line arrived with a Bible and a sword. One ancestor persecuted Quakers. The son was conspicuous in the witch trials, and Hawthorne takes that stain on himself. Those same gray forefathers would look at a writer of story-books and ask what kind of business that is. A fiddler, they murmur, would have glorified God about as well. He knows what happens when the same stock is replanted, generation after generation, in worn-out ground. A potato fails that way. A family fails that way. His children, he decides, will root somewhere else.
The men under his orders are mostly old sea-captains who sleep in chairs tipped against the wall and dread a new surveyor the way a crew dreads a politician with an axe. He does not swing it. He lets them stay, and he knows the mercy is also a failure of office. Among them an Inspector of eighty has buried three wives and twenty children and still talks of roast meat as if dinner had never been interrupted. Hawthorne studies him with a kind of delight and decides the man has appetite, a cheerful temper, and almost nothing you could call a soul. The Collector is another kind of ruin. General Miller, whose step was once foremost in the charge, climbs the granite stairs by leaning on the iron rail. He sits by the fire, mild and heavy and kind. His famous words were "I'll try, Sir." In the same building a clerk bred to the revenue makes every tangle vanish. That man is the Custom-House. Hawthorne, who has sat with Emerson and walked with Thoreau, finds those faculties going quiet. Moonlight on a familiar carpet, the hour when a romance writer should meet his guests, is no brighter to him than a tallow candle. His name goes out into the world as black stencil on pepper-bags and cigar-boxes. Two or three of the veterans never appear in winter. When he lets the weakest rest from what they call their labours, they die soon after, as if the office had been the only thing keeping them alive. He calls it a pious consolation that they had time to repent. He also knows the Custom-House doors do not open on the road to Paradise. While he still holds the pen, the sketch is meant to sit beside shorter tales. Those tales are held back. What he keeps in front of the public is the letter, the woman, and a last picture of the Town Pump, which the grandchildren of Salem may someday point out when they think of the scribbler.
Literature, while he holds the post, is of little moment. He does not care for books. Nature, except human nature, is hidden from him. He insists the gift is not gone, only suspended, and that he could recall it when he chose. The belief does not survive the room. His fellow officers know him as a surveyor and as nothing else. None of them has read a page of his. The Naval Officer will talk of Napoleon or Shakespeare. A junior clerk sometimes covers a sheet of official paper with lines that look, from a few yards off, like poetry. That is the whole of his lettered life inside the building, and he says it is enough. He had come to the post from the Old Manse, and from the company of people who talked beside fallen boughs. Brook Farm, Emerson, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Alcott: the Custom-House is the diet after that table. He tells himself the suspension of his gift is temporary, a life he can recall when he chooses. Pue's packet is the recall. It still does not work while the salary continues. The eagle over the door stays behind him.
On a rainy day in the unfinished upper hall he opens a yellow parchment packet. Inside is Governor Shirley's commission for Jonathan Pue, an earlier surveyor of the port, and a worn scrap of red cloth, gold thread almost rubbed away. It is a letter A, a little over three inches on each limb. Set on his breast, it burns with a heat that is not quite of the body, as if the rag were iron. A small roll in Pue's hand gives the life of Hester Prynne. Hawthorne will invent the motives. He claims only the outline as true. The dead surveyor seems to stand in the room, wig and all, and order the story published: the profit Hawthorne's, the credit Pue's. Hawthorne answers that he will.
The promise does not wake the writer while the salary continues. The characters stay like corpses and ask what he has to do with them. He has bartered his power over unrealities for a pittance of public gold. He grows afraid of becoming the Inspector, a man for whom dinner is the centre of the day. The election of General Taylor ends that fear by a rougher road. His own head is the first to fall. The newspapers carry him for a week or two like a headless horseman. He finds the joke useful. Three years in the Custom-House have rested a weary brain and gone on too long. He buys ink and steel pens, opens the desk, and takes up Pue's papers. The tale that comes looks stern and sunless. He blesses his friends, forgives his enemies, and speaks as a man already past the grave. Salem, which he had felt as a destiny, turns to cloud. He is a citizen of somewhere else. The scarlet letter, and the woman who wore it, are what the dismissal puts back in his hand.
